Vitruvius says, that the Greek Forum was square, with ambulatories in the upper story; the Roman was oblong, with porticos, and shops for bankers, and with galleries in the upper floor, adapted for the management of the public revenues. The Roman forum also included many other edifices of a different nature; as the basilicæ, prison, curiæ, and were enriched with colonnades and sculpture. That of Trajan was entered by four triumphal arches, and had his magnificent column in the centre of it.
A few words will describe the present state of this celebrated spot:—
Now all is changed! and here, as in the wild, The day is silent, dreary as the night; None stirring, save the herdsman and his herd, Savage alike; or they that would explore, Discuss and learnedly; or they that come (And there are many who have crossed the earth) That they may give the hours to meditation, And wander, often saying to themselves, “This was the Roman Forum.”
The list of edifices in the Forum would be tedious; nor could even learned antiquaries now make it correct; but among them we may mention the temple of the Penates, or household gods, the temple of Concord, the temple of Jupiter Stator, the temple of Castor and Pollux[153], the temple of Vesta, the temple of Victory, the temple of Julius Cæsar, and the arches of Fabian, Tiberius, and Severus. All these, however, and in most cases even the traces of them, have disappeared,—the few objects remaining being a puzzle to such persons as take an interest in them, and examine the matters on the spot.
“The glories of the Forum are now fled forever,” says Mr. Eustace. Its temples are fallen; its sanctuaries are crumbled into dust; its colonnades encumber pavements, now buried under their remains. The walls of the rostra, stripped of their ornaments, and doomed to eternal silence; a few shattered porticos, and here and there an insulated column standing in the midst of broken shafts, vast fragments of marble capitals and cornices heaped together in masses, remind the traveller that the field which he now traverses was once the Roman forum[154]. It is reduced, indeed, not to the pasture-ground for cattle, which Virgil has described, but to the market-place for pigs, sheep, and oxen; being now the Smithfield of Rome. The hills, the rivers, the roads and bridges, in this mother of cities, mostly go by their ancient Latin names, slightly altered in Italian, but the Forum has not even retained its name; it is now called Campo Vaccino, or the Field of Cows!
This scene[155], though now so desolate and degraded, was once the great centre of all the business, power, and splendour of Rome. Here, as long as the Romans were a free people, all the affairs of the state were debated in the most public manner; and from the rostra, elevated in the midst of the square, and with their eyes fixed on the capitol, which immediately faced them, and which was suited to fill their minds with patriotism, whilst the Tarpeian rock reminded them of the fate reserved for treason and corruption, the noblest of orators “wielded at will” the fierce democracy, or filled the souls of gathered thousands with one object, one wish, one passion—the freedom and glory of the Roman race;—a freedom which would have been more enduring had the glory been less.
“Yes; in yon field below, A thousand years of silenced factions sleep— The Forum, where the immortal accents glow, And still the eloquent air breathes, burns, of Cicero! “The field of freedom, faction, fame, and blood. Here a proud people’s passions were exhaled, From the first hour of empire in the bud, To that when further worlds to conquer fail’d; But long before had Freedom’s face been veil’d, And Anarchy assumed her attributes; Till every lawless soldier who assail’d Trod on the trembling senate’s slavish mutes, Or raised the venal voice of baser prostitutes.”
Here the orators of the people brought their accusations against public men, or pronounced eulogies on such as had died for their country; and here, also, were exhibited the bleeding heads or lifeless bodies of traitors, or, as it but too often happened, of men unjustly deemed so by an overbearing faction. The Forum was the court of justice, and in homely days of the early republic, civil and criminal causes were tried and decided by simple laws in the open air, or in very plain sheds built in this square. The humble schools for the republican children (for even these old Romans had places of public instruction for the poor people) stood round the Forum, which seems to have been intermixed with shops, shambles, stalls, lowly temples, and altars.
No object within the walls of Rome, according to Dr. Burton, is so melancholy as the Forum. “We may lament,” says he, “the ruin of a temple or a palace, but our interest in the remaining fragments is frequently diminished by our either not knowing with certainty to what building they belonged, or because history has not stamped them with any peculiar recollections. But standing upon the hill of the Capitol, and looking down upon the Forum, we contemplate a scene with which we fancy ourselves familiar, and we seem suddenly to have quitted the habitations of living men. Not only is its former grandeur utterly annihilated, but the ground has not been applied to any other purpose. When we descend into it, we find that many of the ancient buildings are buried under irregular heaps of soil. A warm imagination might fancy that some spell hung over the spot, forbidding it to be profaned by the ordinary occupations of inhabited cities. What Virgil says of its appearance before the Trojan settlers arrived, is singularly true at the present moment: